[Game] ‘Starfield’ Steam Deck review in progress - "good in some parts but struggles in cities"
[Game] ‘Starfield’ Steam Deck review in progress - "good in some parts but struggles in cities"
One of the advantages of not paying much attention to pre-release media, has been discovering many things directly in-game. Starfield is a huge game, and Bethesda Game Studios' most ambitious and polished one yet, but it still feels familiar in many ways.
"After dozens of hours on just Steam Deck, Starfield feels good in some parts, but really struggles in the bigger cities. Turning everything to low and enabling FSR2 is basically the only way to play it right now on Valve’s handheld, and even that drops to 20fps often in the first major city (New Atlantis). The game itself can look very good on the device screen in many parts, but it is very CPU-heavy right now. This has been tested after the day one patch as well."
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Yeah. I love my deck, but I'm realistic that it's not going to run Starfield lol.
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My Steamdeck is crushing anything released prior to 2020, but it's chugging on Baldurs Gate 3. Barring the ability to turn the graphics settings waaaaay down, I don't see myself playing this on anything but my desktop.
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Yep lol same with mine. BG3 is a little wonky in parts and I haven't reached Act 3 yet. I'm almost there, so I hope the patch has fixed it for the Deck.
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I got bg3 acceptable to me and love it on steam deck. Maybe I have low standards though
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You beat me to it. The Deck is great but we have to be realistic about the limits of the hardware.
It’s not like it gets to break the rules because it’s popular!
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struggles in cities
It makes a ton of sense: the Steam Deck is memory bandwidth limited.
You can overclock the CPU and you get a few FPS extra on some games. You overclock the memory (which only works in models with non-Samsung memory) and the performance gains can be in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 FPS.
Though the GPU is for sure a big limitation, it could offer way more consistency if paired with even faster memory. Cities and other areas filled with multiple moving models are perfect scenarios to demonstrate memory pressure.
One tiny way one can help is reducing or outright disabling anisotropic filtering. We take it for granted on desktop CPUs, we can push it to 16x and not notice a single FPS drop - however, it's extremely reliant on memory bandwidth so on a device like the Steam Deck forcing it off can help tremendously with 1% lows.
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I think it speaks to the power of the Steam Deck that Starfield can even run at all, I certainly wasn't expecting that.
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We had this conversation over on Beehaw chat just yesterday. I absolutely think it's okay for Valve to say "No, your has to meet performance standards to become verified." Personally, I feel like Verified should guarantee 60 FPS, with dips in places. Playable should be a stable 30 FPS. That said they have zero performance requirements right now so running 10 FPS could potentially be verified status.
Right now though, Valve is verifying everything they can to say "see we have high-end releases on the steam deck." and in the end, it's going to hurt them.
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While I appreciate a 60fps experience as much as the next gamer, this game targets 30fps on consoles. A 60 fps guarantee for Verified status is totally unrealistic.
I agree that there needs to be some sort of performance standards, but not everything has to run at 60 fps to give an absolutely fantastic experience. 30fps (as long as it's a solid 30 fps) can do that too.
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It's also okay for Valve to accept that some of these new releases aren't going to run well on the steam deck. I don't think they are willing to take that answer though. Frankly, in my mind, Starfield should never be verified on steam deck. It's not playable at 20 FPS.
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I think they should add some eplanation to each "Verified" status game, giving some insight as to what performance to expect. Games that run at a stable 60fps deserve to be separated from games that only just run at 30. At least make separate "Verified (60fps)" and "Verified (30fps)" tags.
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Many people play games at 40fps on the deck. Maybe taking a look in ProtonDB or Steam reviews is more useful than having a 8 tier verification system?
As I understand Verified should be runs on the deck in SteamOS stable, at 30fps most of the time, text can be read, game is 100% playable with gamepad.
Playable should be you will jump hops. Text is not legible on the deck screen, input with a keyboard or mouse is required, launchers make weird launching the game.
The Verified program is not a performance benchmark. It’s a baseline and each gamer has different performance thresholds.
Some games won’t run at 60fps in any platform (Dark Souls original release) so they should not be PC verified?
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I could see that being better than Verified/Playable. At the end of the day though, seeing these games under 30 FPS getting verified is a shocker.
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